The present invention pertains to the field of telecom network management systems, in particular to network management communications.
Acronyms used in this specification are defined below:                GUI Graphical User Interface        HW Hardware        IF Interface        NE Network Element        NMS Network Management System        PC Personal Computer        SW Software        
Conventional telecom network management systems (NMS) rely on command and messaging based communications for transactions and information distribution between various elements of the NMS and the network being managed. Examples of such commonly used messaging and command based NMS communications techniques are various versions of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Transaction Language 1 (TL1) and Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP). Moreover, conventional NMS implementations are often based on complex, technology and system vendor specific concepts, such as Management Information Bases (MIBs), for storing or representing various sets of network management objects, and various types of methods to operate on, e.g., given MIB objects.
These conventional NMS transactions and methods are normally event-triggered such that they can occur spontaneously or in an unsolicited manner. For example, they may occur based on dynamic events that take place on network data plane, based on automated NMS response to particular information received from the network being managed, or based on human operator initiated network management operations. For instance, network defect or fault activations and de-activations cause NMS messages among various elements of NMS implementations with conventional NMS technologies. Likewise, individual transactions, such as accessing a given parameter at a network element (NE) (e.g., reading a NE performance monitoring status register or re-configuring a NE control register), involve their specialized messaging and command based transactions with conventional NMS techniques. Moreover, to complete even such a basic NMS transaction, several stages of protocol, message, language and data format conversions are involved with conventional NMS implementations. These messaging based prior art NMS schemes are prone to become overloaded during times of high loads of NMS and network event activities. As a consequence, conventional network management and NMS communications systems and methods are reactive in their nature and impulsive in operation, causing several significant problems inherent with them. These problems include the following:
The conventional NMS performance degrades when the NMS capabilities are most urgently needed, e.g., during bursts of messaging and transaction triggering network events, e.g., major network failures.
Several functional components of conventional NMS techniques are vendor dependent or vendor specific. This causes the full system integration to become complicated and requiring various stages of integration SW, i.e., middleware to be designed between the functional components, resulting in lost NMS transparency from NMS user IF to the network element HW, reduced system flexibility and increased cost.
Many conventional NMS techniques are specific to certain protocols, languages or data formats, causing the need for various stages of protocol conversion agents and the like, further complicating the conventional NMS implementations while making them less transparent and less flexible.
Since NMS operations with conventional systems and technologies are typically based on a predefined, fixed set of commands or methods (e.g., requests, responses etc. predefined atomic transactions) specific to and limited by the technologies in use at a given implementation, the scope of possible functionality supported through conventional NMS are commonly strictly restricted to only such a subset of capabilities of the components of the NMS implementation that is supported by each component throughout the implementation.
It is thus observed that, even with their exhaustive implementational complexity, conventional NMS techniques are usually inefficient in operation. Accordingly, there is a need for innovations that enable streamlined network management communications, providing more intuitive, transparent and flexible operational capabilities with architecturally improved scalability, reliability and performance, especially under heavy load of network management and network data plane event activities.